Young Filipino-Canadian donates books to schools

Chris Mills spent most of his youth in the Philippines with his Filipina mother. When he went to Canada for college, he was awed by the high-quality textbooks available in the country and wished that students in public schools in the Philippines could be exposed to these educational materials as well.

Mills thought that if he could collect a large number of books to be sent to public schools in the Philippines, it would certainly create a huge impact on the lives of students and teachers.

He began his Books-for-Philippines project by speaking to a lot of people at his university. Mills was met by a lot of challenges at the start owing especially to his age. He said people didn’t have any confidence that he could pull it off since he was “just a kid.”

But thanks to his professor Russell Turner, Mills’s project took a nice turn. With Turner’s support, Mills was able to convince a number of students, professors, and college administrators to join in and start collecting books. He went from office to office with his friends at Trent University and Fleming College, where Turner was a well-liked professor. Eventually, an entire community of people formed itself to work on the project all together.

Many books they gathered were written by the world’s leading experts in their respective fields, and typically cost Canadian students between P5,000 and P15,000 apiece.

Soon the number of books collected by Mills reached thousands, and storage problems naturally cropped up. Fortunately, his fraternity pals helped in pooling cash and delivering numerous books to other cities on weekends and in between their classes.

Shipping the massive load of books to the Philippines also became an issue due to the high cost of sending all of the packages. This was, however, solved when a Filipino logistics company offered to ship all the books for free.

More than 1,700 books arrived in the Philippines, and most of the shipment went to top-ranked Bulacan State University (BSU), which has one of the largest state universities outside Metro Manila with a student population of about 25,000.

Mills said that he is looking forward to further growing his project and delivering more books to schools across the Philippines.